Recontextualisation of SFL Appraisal analysis in the teaching of doctoral conclusion writing: The role of Attitude and Graduation in positively evaluating research contribution

This study investigates how doctoral writers across disciplines linguistically realise positive evaluation of their research contributions in thesis conclusions. Drawing on the Appraisal system within Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin & White, 2005), we analyse instances of Move 2, Evaluating the study, Step 1, Indicating significance (Yang & Allison, 2003; Loi et al., 2016) in a corpus of Politics and International Relations, Psychology, and Computer Science theses from two UK universities. We identify patterns in the use of resources for inscribed Attitude and Attitude evoked via the Force and Focus categories of Graduation , and compare our findings with the representation of evaluative language for this purpose in published pedagogic resources, concluding that both the rhetorical purpose and its linguistic realisation are currently to a large extent neglected. We discuss both implications for doctoral writing practitioners, including detailing a possible pedagogic intervention informed by our data, and implications with regard to the 'Applied Linguistics' vs. 'Applied-ness' debate.